A Back-Seat Narrator by the Name of Ishmael

Is there a stranger figure in American literature than the narrator of “Moby-Dick”? He says, “Call me Ishmael” — the very first words of the book — but that isn’t exactly the same as saying “My name is Ishmael.” He could be anyone, of any name, but Ishmael is what the reader must agree to call him before the book can get under way. I recently drove with a friend from my farm in New York State to Southern California, and Ishmael was our companion. We picked him up, so to speak, on the dark, icy streets of New Bedford, round about 1851, and delivered him within sight of what he calls “your contemplative Pacific,” ageless as always.

As “Moby-Dick” proceeded — read aloud by the sterling William Hootkins — I began to feel as though we were carrying a garrulous hitchhiker, a transcendental encyclopedist, indeed a back-seat whaler of sorts. Sometimes Ishmael reclined at his leisure, telling his tale with an outspoken, formal bravado, the way he tells the Town-Ho story to some Spanish gentlemen in Lima in the 54th chapter. Mostly, he leaned forward into the space between the driver’s and passenger’s seats, shifting between philosophical agony and philosophical reverie, looking out upon the country passing by, moralizing it for us, perpetually searching out its meaning.

And to Ishmael nothing escaped meaning, no matter how slight or significant it was. “Do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?” That was his perpetual question. It sprang to mind at the sight of the sedimentary road cuts in rural Missouri, at the glutted rivers we passed, at harvested fields laced with frost. A pasture of white cattle gave Ishmael the shivers. To him, nothing was merely itself. This world of appearances through which we were driving, real enough to us, was to Ishmael but the spiritual world protruding into our senses. At Marsha’s Country Kitchen in Chandler, Okla., everyone stared at us as we entered — two New Yorkers and their imaginary narrator. We felt as though we had approached some metaphysical border, as though we ourselves were members of the phantom boat crew Ahab smuggles aboard the Pequod, at whom everyone stares in wonderment when they make their first appearance in Chapter 47.

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I stopped to look at the long disused lamps in the window of the thrift shop next door to Marsha’s, and in my ear Ishmael whispered, once again, “Do you not find a strange analogy?” Nothing would placate him but saying yes. And yet, somehow, I came to love his digressions, philosophical and factual. They are as characteristic of Ishmael as his puzzling inner knowledge of Ahab’s state of being. If we had driven to California as circuitously as Ishmael narrates, we would be somewhere in the Yukon now, bound for Los Angeles.

I began to be glad of a few things. The most important is this: “Moby-Dick” was published eight years before Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.” What would Ishmael have made of evolution? How it would have enriched, not to say engulfed, his telling! In “Moby-Dick,” nature is a horror. If a creature is believed to be knowing, like the great white whale, it is assumed to be malevolent. And if it has no humanlike awareness, it is endowed, like the polar bear, with “irresponsible ferociousness.” Beneath “the loveliest tints of azure,” there is “the universal cannibalism of the sea.” Under Ishmael’s tutelage, I began to feel guilty for admiring the sunset as we rolled toward Albuquerque. Who knew what the sun was scorching as it rolled over the horizon?

I was always glad at day’s end too, when we parked and turned off “Moby-Dick.” Not that the book ended then. Usually, in the evening, I would begin reading the book where we had left off listening. I have never been so struck by the silence of the printed word. I have never grasped so clearly how inward words have to go in our minds before they come alive. I was the one leaning forward, hearkening to Ishmael, keenly aware of the whiteness of the page, just as I had been every time I’d read “Moby-Dick” before.

Someone must survive to tell the tale, and I will be giving nothing away to say that it is Ishmael, lone survivor of the Pequod. My question is this. Why does Ishmael survive in italics? The rest of the book is set in roman type, but the epilogue is not. What manner of being is this italicized survival? I searched for the strange analogy that must be hidden in it, but I could not find it.

I would like to say that we drove down to the docks at San Pedro to drop off Ishmael and his carpetbag, where he might drive away the spleen and regulate his circulation by putting to sea again. But of course we did nothing of the sort. We parked instead under the peaceful, flickering shade of an Australian eucalyptus, which put me in mind of those Sydney men “so much distrusted by our whaling captains.” And then we disembarked ourselves, while Ishmael vanished into the soft California light.

A version of this editorial appears in print on January 27, 2013, on page SR10 of the New York edition with the headline: A Back-Seat Narrator By the Name of Ishmael. Today's Paper|Subscribe